Situation-Aware Multi-Agent System for Disaster Relief Operations Management
Gabriel Jakobson, Altusys Corp, Nandan Parameswaran, John Buford, Lundy M. Lewis, PRADEEP KUMAR RAY · 2006
Natural and human-made disasters create unparalleled challenges to Disaster Situation Management (DSM). One of the major weaknesses of the current DSM solutions is the lack of comprehensive understanding of the overall disaster operational situation, and very often making decisions based on a single event. Such weakness is clearly exhibited by the solutions based on the widely used Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) models for building the MuitiAgent Systems (MAS). In this work we present the adaptation of the AESOP situation management architecture to address the requirements of disaster relief operations. In particular, we extend the existing BDI model with the capability of situation awareness. We describe how the key functions of event collection, situation identification, and situation assessment are implemented in MAS architecture suitable to the characteristics of large-scale disaster recovery. We present the details of a BDI agent in this architecture including a skeleton ontology, and the distributed service architecture of the AESOP platform.